Language

Pig Tales

Year:

1996

Not easy writing your story when you live in a pigsty, and, what's more, when you've become a sow. Such is the extraordinary adventure of the female narrator of this bitingly sensual fable, who undergoes this transformation under the stupid gaze of her boyfriend Honoré, who puts on pounds, who realizes a sudden aversion to pork products, who finds herself growing supernumerary breasts, and who finishes, without choice, by leaving her job at the perfume store where she is a very special kind of hostess… Sometimes human, sometimes animal she ends up rummaging in the gutters and the public gardens where she finds vegetable garbage to eat; she gives birth to piglets; she becomes the spokesperson for the future president of France before becoming the mistress of a very seductive wolf who eats pizza delivery men, and she almost ends her life on the plate of her own mother.
Behind these porcine adventures a society is portrayed that appears obsessed with healthy living but which is actually corrupt, that is a vast animal farm where purchases are paid for with the Euro or the Internet Card, where charlatans and mystical nuts vie for power. The story of this transformation thus doubles as a morality play wherein one sees the intentions of social satire in the work of the imagination. Placing herself from the start under the aegis of Knut Hamsun, the narrator, devilish sow that she is, from the savagery attendant to humanity, allows the reader to reconnect with the pleasures of reading which come from afar.